Quotes Galore : Call Me By Your Name By André Aciman

I think, I am obsessed.

Captivated. Infatuated. Possessed. Bewitched.

The moment I laid my eyes on Elio and Oliver, I knew, it was the beginning of an end. I knew, deep down in my heart, even if I did not want to admit to it at the time, that I was caught. The world building, the story telling, the complexity, the characters. All of it was so perfectly choreographed, that I found myself falling, knew that I was falling, and didn’t care that I was.

I was becoming more and more immersed with the characters and their lives. So much so, to the point where, after I finished watching the movie, I immediately picked up the book. Solely because I was totally, and wholly enraptured. I wanted to know every single crevices, every single nook and cranny. I longed to know and understand everything, not letting chance to anything.

I needed to know more about the story and characters that have managed to move me. To reach into my very soul and effectively slid themselves through. Making them a part of me, making their story a part of me. And they have succeeded. They have more than succeeded.

Because now I find myself sitting, walking, thinking, breathing this story.

It has been weeks since I last read the book Call Me By Your Name. Days since I last re-watched the movie Call Me By Your Name. And still, I cannot get it out of my head.

So allow me this chance to once again reminisce and relive this breathtaking story. And if you don’t mind, take my hand, and let us walk down this memory lane together.

“It was the unwelcome misgivings with which it finally dawned on me, both then and during our casual conversation by the train tracks, that I had all along, without seeming to, without even admitting it, already been trying—and failing—to win him over.”

“I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.”

“It was almost as though he were doing it on purpose; feeding me slack, and more slack, and then yanking away any semblance of fellowship.”

“Do these things die out on their own or do some things need generations and lifetimes to sort themselves out?”

“We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”

“To be with you. To be with you, Oliver. With or without my bathing suit. To be with you on my bed. In your bed. Which is my bed during the other months of the year. Do with me what you want. Take me. Just ask if I want to and see the answer you’ll get, just don’t let me say no.”

“What I hoped he hadn’t noticed in my overreaction to his grip was something else. Before shirking off his arm, I knew I had yielded to his hand and had almost leaned into it, as if to say—as I’d heard adults so often say when someone happened to massage their shoulders while passing behind them—Don’t stop. Had he noticed I was ready not just to yield but to mold into his body?”

“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.

But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”

“There they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, So many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can’t you? No answer. So many have balked, so why must you? No answer. And then it came, as ever deriding me: If not later, Elio, when?”

“Elio.”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing?”

“Reading.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Thinking, then.”

“About?”

I was dying to tell him.

“Private,” I replied.

“So you won’t tell me?”

“So I won’t tell you.”

“So he won’t tell me,” he repeated, pensively, as if explaining to someone about me.How I loved the way he repeated what I myself had just repeated. It made me think of a caress, or of a gesture, which happens to be totally accidental the first time but becomes intentional the second time and more so yet the third.

“Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can’t say “yes,” don’t say “no,” say “later.” Is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?”

“Time makes us sentimental.

Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

“Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play forever, I’m asking for very little, and I swear I’ll ask for nothing more.”

“There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona. Love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving. Just wait and be hopeful. I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along.

To wait forever.”

“What I would have settled for was not his friendship, not anything. Just to look up and find him there, suntan lotion, straw hat, red bathing suit, lemonade. To look up and find you there, Oliver. For the day will come soon enough when I’ll look up and you’ll no longer be there.”

“If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life,

I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.”

“Youth has no shame, shame comes with age.”

“All I kept thinking of was apricock precock, precock apricock.”

“His life, like his papers, even when it gave every impression of being chaotic, was always meticulously compartmentalized. ”

“What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.”

“You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you.”

“Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent

and our bodies had run out of tricks?”

“The thud my heart gave when I saw him unannounced both terrified and thrilled me. I was afraid when he showed up, afraid when he failed to, afraid when he looked at me, more frightened yet when he didn’t.”

“I came upon the story of a handsome young knight who is madly in love with a princess. She too is in love with him, though she seems not to be entirely aware of it, and despite the friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of that very friendship, he finds himself so humbled and speechless owing to her forbidding candor that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his love.

One day he asks her point-blank: “Is it better to speak or die?”

“If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.”

“Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.”

“Do you like being alone?” he asked.

“No. No one likes being alone. But I’ve learned how to live with it.”

“I know books, and I know how to string words together—it doesn’t mean I know how to speak about the things that matter most to me.”

“And if nothing comes of this, let it never be said that either of us was unaware of what might happen.”

“Everyone goes through a period of traviamento—when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”

“And even if this is all he is willing to give, I’ll take it—I’ll settle for less, even, if only to live with these threadbare scraps.”

Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence,

somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties.

He lifted my face with both hands and stared at me as we had done that day on the berm, this time even more intensely because both of us knew we’d already crossed the bar. “Can I kiss you?”

“I must tell you about this bathing suit,” I said when I closed his closet door.

“Tell me what?”

“I’ll tell you on the train.”

But I told him all the same. “Just promise to let me keep it after you’re gone.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, wear it a lot today—and don’t swim in it.”

“Sick and twisted.”

“Sick and twisted and very, very sad.”

“I’ve never seen you like this.”

“I want Billowy too. And the espadrilles. And the sunglasses. And you.”

“Would I be able to live without his hand on my tummy or around my hips? Without kissing and licking a wound on his hip that would take weeks to heal, but away from me now? Whom else would I ever be able to call by my name?”

“Do you want me man or woman? she/he asked, as if one could scale one’s way back up our phylogenetic tree.

I want you as intermezzo. I want you as both, or as in between.”

“He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed.

The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same. ”

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Why was this suddenly making me nervous? “Shoot.”

“Would you start again if you could?”

I looked at him. “Why are you asking?”

“Because. Just answer.”

“Would I start again if I could? In a second.”

“We looked the other way. We spoke about everything but.

But we’ve always known,

and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more.

We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”

“Italy. Summer. The noise of the cicadas in the early afternoon. My room. His room. Our balcony that shut the whole world out.”